We recently connected with Jake Leizear and have shared our conversation below.

Jake, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

I’ve been doing stand-up for almost 6 years now, meaning December of 2018. While I had been involved in performing for over a decade before that, it mostly consisted of improv and other theater-related opportunities. I held back from trying stand-up for a long time due to the perception that it was a very solitary art form. You’re on stage alone, crafting and performing your own material, and that makes it unique amongst a lot of performance art. Even singers tend to work with a few bandmates, but for most comedians, it’s just you and the microphone.

I started to really explore the work I do now coinciding with the end of a several-year relationship and a move into Baltimore City after living in the suburbs for many years. I was leaving my young adulthood and trying to define myself outside of my education and my childhood. I had started therapy for the first time, began living alone, and really trying to vocalize a lot of thoughts and perspectives I hadn’t been able to communicate before. All of these circumstances coordinated to create a year of new experiences and opportunities that I couldn’t ever dream of being part of my life.

And then 2020 happened!

The complete disruption of life as we know it meant the creative endeavors I had really managed to solidify in about a year had all abruptly stopped over night. I had gone from performing multiple nights a week to performing on Zoom maybe once a month, at most. While there were ebbs and flows of live comedy in a pre-vaccine world, it was something I never felt was worth considering due to the risks involved. So for about a year, I was in stasis like everyone else, having been in stand-up long enough to not entirely quit, but not in for long enough to really use the time to write, edit, or build other non-performance skills.

I think if I had started before late 2018, I may have been able to solidify more of my abilities and skills to go through the pandemic and really navigate that time in our lives to come out a stronger performer. However, I don’t know if I would even BE a comedian if I hadn’t started before 2020. A lot of people disappeared from the artform during that time, and I wouldn’t even know where to begin or if it was for me if I was approaching it in a post-COVID world. While it’s been many years now since that first lockdown, I still treasure the people who have supported me from the very beginning and helped me re-enter live performance with enthusiasm.

The cliche is there’s no time like the present and that God’s timing is always right. There’s a whole multiverse of different opportunities if I had started stand-up sooner, later, or never, but until we figure out that technology, I’m pretty happy in this specific timeline.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a stand-up comedian, improviser, show producer, and all around Baltimore comedy fan. I’ve been doing improv for about 12 years, and stand-up for about 5 and a half. I’ve taken a combination of my experiences as a gay person who struggles with anxiety, my Catholic upbringing, and my somewhat-intense obsession with pop culture to produce various comedy variety acts at the Lou Costello Room for years, and now at The Club Car in Station North, and take my stuff on the road to places like Provincetown MA, Columbus OH, Ontario CA, and all over the mid-Atlantic.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

As a nominee for Best of Baltimore’s Best Twitter Feed 2024, my advice is: quit now. Social media is killing all of us. But I can’t even take that advice, so let’s try another route. I’ve been online since I could read, and a consistent mixture of cat pictures, timely memes, and genuine rotting of my frontal lobe has gotten me a nice little online world. It’s always helped to just intake as much inspiration and content as you can, and react to it in a way that’s special to YOU. It’s not about hopping on the trend, or getting a bajillion followers, it’s about what you have to say in a way that no one else is saying. By doing this, you learn what works and what doesn’t work for both yourself and others. Not only is “the algorithm” not gonna like your last minute, immature, vague and ill-intentioned posts, no one else is either. Bring your best takes and your best jokes to the front, and make sure they include a good graphic or a face picture so the robots that run all of these sites now know it’s a post others wanna see to.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

Show. Up. Not just for the most famous artists, or the most commercially viable. Creative expression is a human right, and the work your local theater troupe, local burlesque artist, or your neighbor who just loves to sing to a small bar are all what make the creative ecosystem of your city a human one. There’s enough talent near you that you could find a new favorite artist every single week, so get out there and find them! And if you have trouble finding them, ask the ones you can find who’s work they like locally right now. Big artists touring arenas near you are fun, but they would never have been able to even dream of getting there if the people in their community didn’t show up for them in the beginning!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://linktr.ee/jake_my_day
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jake_my_day/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jakeleizearcomedy
• Twitter: https://x.com/jake_my_day
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFwJW3hgHNS5zpMHqo4ofyA
• Other: https://tiktok.com/@jake_my_day